Korean War veteran Edward Lee Borders and his unit were marching along Route 29 toward Wanju in 1951 when they encountered a series of ambushes. When his fellow soldiers arrived at their destination days later, Borders wasn’t among them.

The U.S. military declared him dead in 1954. But last summer, unlike thousands of American soldiers who have withered and died in obscurity inside the bloody guts of far-flung battlefields, Borders got to come home.

Last week, as part of a deal struck between the regimes of Kim Jong-Un and President Donald Trump, the remains of 55 U.S. soldiers were flown out of North Korea. The U.S. military will work to identify the remains, but like in the Borders case, it could take years.

Richey formed his nonprofit while studying at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan. He’s since moved to Evansville with his wife, and he’s spent the last year trying to raise money to travel to the Upper Peninsula to help authorities rake through the wreckage of a 1989 plane crash a group of bear hunters stumbled across in 2002.

His dream project, though, is a tad more audacious. He wants to fly to Europe and search the remains of Evansville-area World War II soldiers.

He said there are scores of Evansville-area dead tucked along the French-German border.

There’s a chance residents walk past them every day and don’t even know it. The remnants of Technical Sergeant John Brady, whose plane was shot down in 1944, were found on a German farm last week. His body was shipped home to Taunton, Massachusetts.

“Imagine if you had one of the P-47s built here, (and it) crashed, and they didn’t recover the guy. And it crashed in Burdette Park,” he said. “That’s how close some of these crash sites are to highways in Europe.”

The Korean situation is more complicated, of course. But it does give Tri-State families something they haven’t had in almost 70 years: a sliver of hope.

But in some cases, the boys lucky enough to come home won’t find anyone waiting for them. Their families will be gone, wiped out by the ravages of time.

Elizabeth Outlaw was always afraid that would happen to her brother Lawrence Lander, who died in a prisoner-of-war camp in 1950.